My brain is doing that periodic thing that it does which is to torment me with things that happened long ago about which I can do nothing. And then dwelling on those things until I cannot think about anything productive.
HOW do you stop that? I am not even talking about middle-of-the-night perseveration, although that has been happening too. I am talking about straight up driving home from taking Carla to school and then BAM, “Remember when you did this totally awful and stupid thing? No, but do you REALLY remember it? Let’s go through every moment in excruciating detail.”
There WAS a stupid thing I did, last fall, and I’d managed to forget about it. Until my brain slapped me with the memory.
It was one of those horrible errors that is totally preventable and has an actual cost to it. Like forgetting to return a pair of shoes that don’t fit before the 30-day return period ends. Or backing your car into the garage wall. Or leaving your car windows open all night during a rainstorm. Things that could have been prevented had you been slightly less lazy or more proactive. I can feel my face heating up with residual shame. Such a waste! A preventable waste of money! And not a SMALL amount of money, either. We were so fortunate to be able to pay for my mistake, and my husband was extremely kind about it even though he would NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS make that kind of mistake. Why? Why did I let that happen? And why am I thinking about it NOW?
I would say that it’s because I just did another stupid money-wasting thing (My phone has been disconnecting from our wi-fi, and I didn’t notice, and I have just willy nilly been watching Instagram videos and scrolling through apps and downloading – good gourd – a ONE POINT NINE GIGABYTE package of bird sounds from Merlin Bird ID, all while connected to the cellular network. We do not have unlimited data, and in fact only use about 5-6 GB of data per month among the three of us, and I have used NINE GIGABYTES, all by myself, in five days. And we have 25 days left in the month before our data resets. And yet, we can buy more data, a GB at a time, but each GB costs $15 which is not nothing!) but I have been torturing myself with the earlier money-wasting thing for weeks now. So who knows.
Anyway, it’s good for internal piling on: I am the worst, stupidest person, totally oblivious to important things. I am costing our family money for NO REASON. No one else would make such a dumb mistake! I can see that I’m not connected to wifi just by looking at the top of the phone, and I am on my stupid phone all the damn time! I am a drain on our finances and worthless to boot!
It’s not even just things I DID, it’s all sorts of things, like how I was going through old yearbooks a few summers ago, and discovered that this boy I’d had a crush on for years had written something filthy in my sixth grade annual. I had no idea what it meant at the time, but I can imagine all the other middle school boys giggling about it. And WHY did he write such a thing? We were friends! I may have had a crush on him, but there was never anything but friendship between us. And I was friends with him for YEARS after he scrawled that crude suggestion in my yearbook.
Should I throw out my yearbook? Scratch out those awful words with permanent marker? Re-evaluate all my relationships?
Why am I thinking about this? I didn’t even find the yearbook recently; it was AT LEAST two years ago, if not more.
Or the other day, I was out for a lovely walk in the snow and instead of enjoying the feeling of snowflakes kissing my cheeks and the sound of my boots crunching in the snow, I started thinking about another awful boy, this one in high school, who once mentioned he’d seen me outside my music teacher’s house after my lesson, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, waiting for a parent to pick me up. He told me I looked like a hooker. A HOOKER. We were in high school. Why would his mind go there? And why would he TELL me such a thing? And why am I furious about it NOW, a million years after the fact?
Why are schoolage boys so awful? Not all of them – not yours, surely. But enough of them to make a difference. Will Carla have to deal with boys like this? Will they write grotesque things in her yearbook? How am I going to protect her heart from being infected by terrible people? I have no idea how to protect her or prepare her. I really have no business being a mother if I can’t help her understand that there are people who are mean and hurtful for no reason… but without crushing her spirit.
And then there are more examples of me being a terrible person and parent. Like how last summer, there was a mortifying incident involving another mom and her kids of the sort that makes me a) wonder how, when a child knows The Rules and has shown that they know them and can follow them, they can occasionally not just forget The Rules but flaunt them? And b) how am I possibly equipped to be a parent if I can’t convey the importance of The Rules and how they are meant to be followed always, not just on a whim? I’ve been going over and over that event (which turned out fine! everyone is fine!) and coming up with The Exact Perfect Thing that I should have said or did at the time, instead of saying and doing what I did say and do, which was nothing is except standing in gape-mouthed mortification and letting the other mother take the disciplinary lead. How is this helping anyone, to go over and over it?
Oh, lord, and there was that other time? With this same mom? When I saw her kid on the sidewalk, by himself, two blocks from home. I was in my car and stopped and asked him if he was okay and if his mom knew where he was, and he said yes and yes. So we kept driving. I pulled up my phone so I call his mother but before I could do so, we saw her on the sidewalk. She was frantic with worry, because she’d lost him. I was able to tell her where he was, but I keep kicking myself for not STAYING WITH HIM and calling her. I could have just stayed right there in my car! But I didn’t! I kept driving! Why? Why did I do that? It all worked out okay, but WHY DID I DO THAT?
You see? It’s not enough that my brain torment me with one thing. It’s got to get right in there with hit after hit after hit. Why can’t it just leave the past in the past and focus on doing the best job possible NOW?
I woke up at 3:00 this morning from a bad dream. In the dream, I was in my childhood home with my husband. Somehow, my horse had gotten into the house, and we were trying to get him out but he was stomping around and bumping into the furniture and getting very riled up and upset. In the confusion, a fire started in the dining room. My husband was yelling, in a very loud monotone, “Fire! Fire! Fire!” That’s when I woke up.
My father is a volunteer fire fighter, and he’d told me yesterday about a recent fire that had devasted a dwelling. Plus, my husband and I started watching a new show this weekend and last night’s episode featured an explosion that resulted in a house going up in flames. So I think it’s safe to say that I had fire on the brain.
Nonetheless, it’s easy for a dream like mine to have the weight of prescience, foreshadowing, and I lay there in the dark house taking long deep breaths through my nose, trying to smell smoke, listening intently for the crackle of flames. I finally got up and did a walk-through of my home, which allowed me to fall back to sleep after an hour or so of troubled thoughts about my loved ones and whether the dream fire had escaped into any of their homes.
We’re also about to begin the new school year, and, along with it, a new schedule of extracurricular activities. So perhaps my brain was merely venting its feelings of facing the unknown in an uncontrolled way.
Carla will be doing extracurricular activities FOUR DAYS A WEEK, sometimes five, and that sounds completely bonkers I am aware. But these activities are ones she has been wanting to do for a long time, and we discussed the time commitment at length as a family, and my husband and I think they will be good for her.
But I am fretting, as usual, about dinner. Dinner is a thing I can – usually – control, in a world that increasingly feels uncontrollable, but I haven’t quite figured out how I will make it work with our new schedule, so I am out of sorts. Horse-in-the-dining-room, fire-breaking-out out of sorts, it seems.
Some weekdays will be normal – by which I mean Carla has no commitments after school is out. One day each week, she will have an extracurricular commitment that takes place after school but ends before dinner. I suppose on those days, I will need to have everything prepped and ready to go so that we can come home from the activity and I can immediately get food in the oven. Some weekdays, we will have a couple of hours of free time after school, and then the extracurricular activity takes place in the evening. My plan is to feed Carla dinner before we leave for her activity. But then, it will be quite late when we return, and she’ll need to shower and go to bed immediately upon arriving home. (To accommodate the new activities, we’re pushing her bedtime back a teeny bit to 8:30, as long as she still gets adequate rest.) So… when will my husband and I eat?
(Recall, if you will, that our normal school-year dinner schedule is: Carla eats at 5:30 and is in bed by 7:30-8:00, my husband arrives home between 6:00 and 8:00, my husband and I eat between 8:30-9:00. Thanks, I hate it.)
I wailed to my husband that we might be eating a lot of Lean Cuisine this year, and he very kindly said that that was FINE, we would make it work. But I don’t really LIKE Lean Cuisine (or its brethren), so I would prefer to find an alternative that isn’t a) fast food or b) nothing or c) me making dinner at nine o’clock at night or d) some variation on Lean Cuisine. (Although all of those are options occasionally, I don’t want to do any of them ALL the time.)
Making meals with built-in leftovers sounds like our best option. That’s why I have chicken fajitas on the menu this week. That way, I can eat before the activity and my husband can eat whenever he gets home. But I’m not great about knowing which meals will produce leftovers, and it seems to me that most of them (not all, but a lot of the ones I love: chicken paprikas! pizza! chili! spaghetti and meat sauce! tacos!) are the more decadent, less I’m Trying to Lose Weight ones that I would prefer to be eating lately. Sigh. Maybe Lean Cuisine is the way to go.
20 Minute Korean Beef Sesame Noodles: This doesn’t seem particularly leftovers-friendly, although that could be my own bias against reheating beef, but it sounds really tasty.
What are some of your favorite Plentiful Leftovers meals? Also, your favorite make-ahead meals, quick meals, one-person-eats-now,-the-other-person-eats-later meals?
I woke up at 4:00 am with a splitting headache and then couldn’t fall back to sleep. So I am feeling a bit fretful and complainy this morning.
I don’t want Carla to get Covid. I have been doing my very best at isolating, but it is slightly tricky with my husband being back at work and me, you know, having to feed and care for my child. I wear a mask any time I venture out of my bedroom. I spend as little time in the “main house” as possible. Carla cries at bedtime because I can’t hug and kiss her goodnight. We have a little stash of rapid tests and have been making good use of them, and Carla and I went to the pharmacy the other day to get PCR tests. (That was nerve-wracking – we both wore masks AND I kept all the car windows wide open the whole time.) (My husband calmly reminds me that we were all just in a car/hotel room together, windows closed and maskless, for fifteen days.) Carla’s PCR test was negative, mine was not. I don’t know how I could manage to be the only one to get Covid, but if that’s how it works out, I will be very glad. Carla did just get her booster before we left, so I’m hoping she was at Peak Immunity when she was exposed to me and my germs.
Here’s what I want to know about isolating in a home you share with others. How does it WORK? My bedroom is not magically on some alternate air circulation system. Every time I open the door, surely germs are escaping into the rest of the house. My mask isn’t trapping 100% of all the little Covid particles. HOW can we avoid getting Carla sick? It seems impossible. And yet, some people manage? I think?
The next two bullets are Deeply Boring and yet I cannot bring myself to delete them.
I have been trying to do a little work from my bedroom. This means phone calls, my least favorite task of all. Do you recall the bank that charges us an annual “inactive” fee for an account whose sole purpose is sit there as collateral until we pay off a loan? (All the mind-numbing details are here.) After three years of arguing with people who cannot grasp simple concepts who work there, we sailed through 2020 AND 2021 without a late fee, and I was so delighted! They’d finally made a note on my account that there was no reason for me to make a deposit in an account that I cannot access, and had stopped charging me! You can sense what’s coming next, right? My husband alerted me this past May that we had now been charged a total of $12.00 in inactive fees. (Which means they DID charge us in 2021; we just didn’t notice.) Perhaps the bank had waived the fee in 2020 because of The State of Things. And apparently we simply did not notice when we began to lose $2.00 a month from the account. Whoops. As I have mentioned a billion times, normally I HATE making phone calls. But this one particular issue makes me practically giddy with wanting to tell someone how ASININE and RIDICULOUS it is. I was Let Me Talk to a Manager level irritated, after FIVE YEARS (minus the 2020 exception) of this nonsense. So back in May I called the bank and gave the lucky person who answered my spiel about how we should not be charged an inactive fee because the purpose of the account is to remain inactive. Unlike all the other brainless fools everyone else I’ve spoken to at the bank, she IMMEDIATELY understood that it was ridiculous to expect me to add even a single dollar to an account that I cannot touch. Not just ridiculous, but virtually impossible, considering that I don’t have checks or a debit card for that account, nor do I have digital access to the account, nor do I live within a 20 minutes’ drive of the bank. The account is under the control of the bank until we pay off the loan. The woman I spoke to Got It. Like, without my having to do anything but sketch out the basic issue, she said incredulously, “Well that’s ridiculous. Of course you wouldn’t want to add funds to an account you can’t touch! There’s no reason you should be paying an inactive fee on an account that’s meant to be inactive!” It took the bluster out of my Let Me Talk to a Manager sails, but it was SO mollifying to be understood. She said that she would talk with the bank supervisor and get the charge reversed AND she would have them make a note on our file. I was very pleased with the interaction. (Usually, the person I speak to says that ALL we have to do is deposit something in the account! It can be as little as a dollar! Once a year! And there are branches in X and Y and Z cities! Which, yes, I get that this sounds like a small amount of time and money and a very minimal hassle, but THE PRINCIPLE.) You know, perhaps, where this is heading. We came home to another statement which, alongside the credit of the $12, included a debit of $2 for a new inactive fee. ENDLESS SCREAMING.
Yes, I have a second bullet point about the banking thing. This morning, I called the bank and asked specifically to speak to the person I’d spoken to in May. Her name was similar to a fairly common name, but one syllable was different – like “Carlotte” instead of “Charlotte” or “Car-ree” instead of “Carrie” or “Samintha” instead of “Samantha.” I love her with my whole heart. She made things happen AND fully grasped why this situation is so stupid/frustrating. The person I spoke to put me on hold and then said that Samintha was not available but he would connect me to customer service. Sad, but okay. Customer Service means, as I discovered, the customer service line for the entire national banking system, when really I wanted to talk to someone (Samintha, sob!) in my local branch. Oh well. The customer service agent was very nice. His name was Tryin’ with a B. I explained to him that this is an annual problem, and gave him the quick and dirty details, and then he explained to me what was happening. “Oh, I think what the issue is, is that you have a LOAN, and this is a CHECKING ACCOUNT (it’s not, actually – it’s a money market account that we cannot access), and since you haven’t made any deposits or withdrawals, they are charging you an inactive fee.” Yes, thank you for repeating the exact same thing I just told you. And, nice as Tryin’ was, he couldn’t DO anything about it because the only person who can DO anything about it is the manager of my local branch. Tryin’ promised me he would call me back but I’m not holding my breath. I think I will see if I can get a hold of Samintha tomorrow.
I get canker sores about once a month and they are GOING WILD right now. I think this is a hormonal thing, but maybe it is a Covid thing? Who knows. Seems like EVERYTHING could be a Covid thing. And yes, canker sores are different from cold sores. They are basically little ulcers that occur inside the mouth, usually on the cheeks or under the tongue. Sometimes I get them on my gums, too. They are AWFUL. I have a massive one under my tongue and one on the very back part of my tongue right where my tongue brushes up against my bottom molars.
The news is so enduringly turbulent. I just typed and erased a 634 word diatribe about one of the various Hot Button Issues that is driving me mad/making me worry that I have made a terrible mistake bringing a child into this fraught world. But I don’t like to write about Hot Button Issues on this blog, so I deleted it. (If I want to torment myselfgnash my teeth and rend my garments over The State of Things catch up on world events, I will look at the news or go on Twitter.) Not that I have anything new or groundbreaking or interesting to say anyway; just vents/frets/threats of walking into the sea. There are SO MANY things going on and I have Feelings about many of them and yet I feel like it is utterly pointless to talk about them. The people I might discuss them with either disagree with me strenuously, which means voicing my own thoughts would lead to the type of confrontational encounter I HATE, and not to mention there’s no way I can convince anyone to feel differently from how they do; I don’t know enough of the background and facts, nor am I well-spoken enough to craft a convincing argument… or they already agree with me, and discussing things will just drive us each deeper into the pits of despair/rage we are already existing in.
My father (a physician for 40+ years) (I don’t know why I feel like I have to make sure you know he’s qualified to give advice) suggested that I make sure Carla is getting enough calcium. This is an ongoing concern, but one I haven’t properly fretted about recently, so I’m in Full Fret Mode right now. Apparently, she needs 1,300 mg of calcium per day – or four servings. She doesn’t get enough calcium. She refuses to drink milk – yes, even chocolate milk. She eats a bunch of cheese, and there is 200 mg of calcium per ounce of block cheddar or per 1/4 cup of shredded cheddar, so that helps, but it’s not enough. She only eats yogurt occasionally. She doesn’t even really like ice cream (and has never liked milkshakes) (she IS related to both me and my ice cream loving husband, I assure you). She eats cream cheese – it’s one of her non-pork camp foods this summer – but, despite having both “cream” and “cheese” right there in the name, there is only 26 mg of calcium per two tablespoons of cream cheese. (And NONE in the whipped cream cheese!) My mom and I walked through a whole list of foods that contain calcium and of that list Carla eats two things with moderate consistency: chickpeas and cheese. And sometimes yogurt. Very rarely, almonds. My mom was being really creative, too. What about calcium fortified orange juice? What about almond milk and almond butter? Carla does not drink juice and she will not touch almond milk with a ten-foot pole. I have no idea if I could get her to eat almond butter but my confidence level is low. Some people have suggested Ensure, but my guess is that if she refuses milk/juice/milkshakes, she will refuse Ensure as well. My current plan is try to coax her into drinking a smoothie every day. I can pack it with yogurt, almond milk, AND calcium fortified orange juice. She likes smoothies. We used to drink a mango smoothie together every week on the drive to ballet practice. But I am not sure if I can get her drink one every single day. My father thinks we should start giving her Tums. (We cannot do the Viactiv chocolate calcium chews.) Probably we will have to use a multi-pronged approach, with smoothies on one prong and roasted chickpeas and plenty of cheese on another prong and Tums on another prong. If you have any magical calcium ideas, I will prong them right up.
Our refrigerator is unplugged and empty right now. This is something we’ve been planning to do, for awhile, and it’s not like I’m making big elaborate dinners at the moment, so it seems like a good time. We bought the fridge in 2011. It has some real advantages, like that it is beautiful and also it holds a TON of food. But it’s been plagued with issues almost from the beginning. To name a few: the door closing mechanism fails on a regular basis (I have learned how to source the replacement part and repair it myself), the ice maker broke and had to be repaired, the water dispenser pressure dropped off precipitously for no discernible (or fixable) reason, the bottom of the fridge fills with water that then turns to ice, the ice maker and dispenser chute are often coated with a slick black mold, the electronic panel frequently disconnects from the temperature readout and makes an incessant tinkling noise. ET CETERA. The most recent repairman I had in the house informed me that the ice problem was A Known Issue with this brand of fridge (GE/Samsung) and that it is unfixable. (He also said that if he’d known in advance this was the fridge we had, he wouldn’t have come out because he knows it is unfixable and wouldn’t want me to have to pay the service fee his company charges for sending someone to our house; he declined to charge me the service fee.) He suggested that best thing we can do is unplug it for three days, wait for the internal mechanisms to thaw, and then plug it back in and hope it works for about six months before we have to do it again. So that is what we are doing: we are thawing out the fridge in hopes that it will magically reset. We are lucky enough to have a second (though much smaller) fridge in the basement, so I have relocated the foods we cannot live without/cannot bear to toss. It is a jumbled mess down there, but at least it functions. However, now I have to run downstairs for every little thing and it’s a pain. (My husband keeps asking me, “Are you breathing heavily because you just went down two flights of stairs to the basement to get a plum and then walked back up two flights of stairs to the bedroom or because you have Covid?”) My father thinks, in a non-pressurey way, that we should just replace the damn fridge already. But I am one of those people who wants a key appliance to LOOK a certain way, and I have grown accustomed to how spacious it is. And have you SEEN how expensive refrigerators are?!?! I am not in the mood to spend one-, two- or three-THOUSAND dollars when a refrigerator should be a ONE-TIME purchase. Of course maybe we will plug the fridge back in and it will refuse to work and we will have to buy one anyway. Fun times!
Speaking of fun times, summer feels like its coming to a close. I feel like there was so much anticipation about the summer, and our Road Trip!, and now the Road Trip! is over and Carla only has two weeks left of camp and then school will start before we know it and then it’s practically Thanksgiving, which might as well be Christmas and then a WHOLE YEAR will have passed.
A final Covid fret (for today, at least): My husband and Carla are following all the Covid protocols set forth by the CDC, my husband’s workplace, and Carla’s camp… but I am still fretting. I am being Very Strident about Carla wearing her mask, and her camp is mainly outdoors, and they only admitted children who were fully vaccinated, but ACK. I am fretting that Carla (despite having no symptoms and still testing negative on a rapid test) will somehow spread this stupid disease to others. (Also, I am very grateful for my little stockpile of rapid tests.) I hate being contagious. It is STUPID and I HATE IT. Well. As of tomorrow, according to the CDC, I am okay to leave isolation and rejoin the public, as long as I wear a mask. I haven’t taken a rapid test since the one that read positive, so I don’t know that I am negative yet, and that seems Kind Of Important, even though no one else (CDC, I am glaring in your direction) seems to agree. Anyway: I don’t have anywhere I plan to go, but the reasons that I COULD are positive: I have no fever (I don’t think I ever did) and my symptoms are improving. Except for the crankiness. That has, if anything, increased.
What are you fretting about? What’s making you cranky? Any complaints to share?
I DID IT. Based on your supportive comments and gentle nudges toward action, I talked to my neighbor about her lovely lunch invitation. First, I resolved to talk to her about it. Next, I cobbled together a script from several commenters’ suggestions, and I practiced it in the car and in the shower. Then, I waited for the Right Opportunity.
Carla provided me with a very nice segue – she was playing with the neighbor’s dog, and I needed her to come home to eat lunch. So I walked next door to fetch her. The neighbor came out and said hello, and I told her the reason for my appearance. Then I made my little speech: “Speaking of lunch, I was thinking about your kind invitation that we have lunch together, and I was so delighted by the offer that I said yes without thinking, but the truth is, Carla and I have so many silly food restrictions between us it’s not really worth getting into, and I was wondering if we could do something a little simpler, like afternoon tea or lemonade?” When I practiced it, I was Breezy and Casual and I had a little self-deprecating laugh in there, plus I also had a line about how of COURSE we wanted to spend time with her… and I also wanted to offer to bring homemade cookies or something… but it all came out in a rush and I forgot some of it. Oh well. At least I got out the important part which was LUNCH WILL NOT GO WELL.
Her immediate reaction was, “Oh no, sometimes I give Carla food when she comes over!” and so I had to reassure her that I didn’t mean allergies, but rather that Carla is the pickiest person on the planet. (Deftly trying to put the bulk of the blame on Carla’s food restrictions rather than my own.) Here is where Carla chimed in and informed our neighbor that I HATE tomatoes. So I am clearly not blameless.
Once I had assured her she wasn’t doing something egregious by feeding my child cherries and red peppers, she seemed to relax a bit. She asked if something like tea and biscuits would be fine and I said that would be lovely and we discussed possible dates (though didn’t settle on anything specific). I am… so relieved. THANK YOU for helping me figure out the right way to handle this sticky situation.
Now I can turn my Food Frets toward camp.
Carla is attending a new camp this summer, and they don’t offer meals. So we will be packing a lunch. This is fine.
Now that she is nearly NINE (which is nearly TEN, omg), I am looking forward to forcing encouraging Carla to make her own lunch (with supervision). We discussed some potential ideas for lunches, and her Ideal Lunch is a Lunchable. She only eats the ham Lunchable, and she only eats the ham, the cookies, and the crackers. She refuses to eat the cheese. If I pack her slices of other cheese – specifically cheddar that I have cut for her – she will eat that.
So I was banking on sending her with Lunchables each day, and that if Lunchables become unavailable (again), or if she gets sick of them, we can pack a bagel and cream cheese with some pepperoni.
To round out her lunch, I would add other things she eats, like pickles and grapes and berries and grape tomatoes and red peppers and sugar snap peas.
So I felt pretty good about our options.
Then we got a note from camp that said NO PORK PRODUCTS.
AHHHHHHHHH
What now???
I suppose what we have to do is revert to PBJ. The camp is not a nut-free campus, so peanut butter is an option. Carla also enjoys eats sun butter, so she (and I) can make sandwiches every day. Carla eats sun butter sandwiches at school all year long, so I know she WILL eat them. But the last time I tried to make her one, she complained because my sandwiches weren’t the SAME as the ones at school.
Weary sigh.
I suppose I can just send her with the equivalent of Snack Dinner, but for lunch. But I am just not sure what the protein situation will be in that case. Snack Dinner usually has pepperoni or a couple of chicken nuggets or two.
I wonder if she would eat cold chicken nuggets (hork)?
The reason that I am fretting about this is two-fold.
The first fold is that the camp really made a Big Deal about ensuring that we sent a LOT of food with our kids to camp. They emphasized that we should send MORE than we think – like, enough food for a week rather than a day. The kids work so hard and are so active, they are ravenous when they get to lunchtime. So I want to a) comply with the rules and b) make sure my particular kid is getting enough sustenance.
The second fold is that Carla already eats next to nothing for lunch. I assume she eats something at school each day, although her reports are sporadic and often sound like, “Oh yeah, I ate a hamburger bun and a slice of American cheese.” So I am already facing an uphill climb when it comes to getting her to eat. I want to stack all the odds in my favor by ensuring her lunches are full of things she LIKES, not just things she tolerates.
Well. I am not really asking for ideas, because I feel like it will be an exercise in frustration. (You, reasonably: “Send her with some chickpeas! Or beans! Or hummus! Or tuna salad! Or turkey! Or a protein drink!” and I will cringe at you while shaking my head because she will not touch ANY of that, and the list is endless.) (I am going to buy some turkey pepperoni and see if Carla will deign to try it.) I am just whining. New camp, new frets.
May is chaos. I was whining to the mom of one of Carla’s classmates recently about busy I feel, and she said in a gritted-teeth, long-suffering voice, “That’s just how May is. And it will get worse as the kids get older.” So that was cheering.
It feels like I was just chugging along, doing my thing, and then suddenly realized that I have fifty deadlines heading my way and I am only partway through each project. Luckily, this isn’t true (at least in the paying work sense; I am on top of those at least). But it FEELS that way. Worse, it feels like everyone else has alsosuddenly had the same realization. My email inbox is jammed with teacher conference requests and reminders to schedule my gutter cleaning and invitations to end-of-year parties and check-ins about summer swimming schedules and gently scolding messages from camp to fill out my kid’s many, many forms already and notifications to update school payment plans and on and on.
We had, in the past week, an invitation to a musical performance at Carla’s school literally three days before the performance itself. And then a notice, seven days ago, from Carla’s teacher, that the class has themed days all this week – and require things like sandals that I had not yet purchased. Then we had to schedule a meeting with one of the teachers to review Carla’s goals for next year. And I (stupidly) signed up to volunteer at a big end-of-school carnival. Not to mention, we get alerts near daily about Covid cases in Carla’s grade. Plus, Carla’s been working on her big Eleanor Roosevelt research project. IT’S A LOT.
I have not felt up to most things lately – reading, cooking, planning meals, blogging – but I miss those things (except planning meals). So let’s try a random info dump. I will try not to complain TOO much, but no promises.
Zoom Awkwardness: While I am deeply, sincerely grateful for the ability to meet with people virtually, I wish someone would figure out how to solve the end-of-meeting awkwardness. You know what I mean. When you have all already said goodbye, but then you have to fumble around to find the button that ends the meeting. I realize that this awkward moment lasts maybe five seconds, but I find it excruciating. Often, I find myself distracted in the last moments of the meeting itself because I am trying to plan my exit in the quickest possible way. But no. Even if I can find the “end meeting” button ahead of time, I inevitably fumble it, or forget that I’ve carefully hovered my cursor over it for exactly that purpose, or the “are you sure?” box pops up and I just want to die of embarrassment. I realize this may not be as big a deal to some people as it is to me, and obviously I have lived to zoom again, but I HATE IT. Just let me out of this virtual discomfort!
End of Year Teacher Gift: Every year, our Room Parent (i.e. Room Mom) collects money for a class gift. Every year, I dutifully send in money. Every year, I fret and worry and scour Etsy for an additional gift that my kid can give to her teacher, personally, on top of the considerable amount we have already sent in. Every year, I decide that the collective gift is BETTER – usually it’s a gift card, and I’m guessing it is much more useful/appreciated by the teacher than whatever dumb crap I could come up with – and exit Etsy without buying the personalized water bottle/bookmark/coffee mug I was pondering. And yet, despite going through this for SIX YEARS NOW, I inevitably find myself in the last week of school, fretting and fretting about the possibility of being the ONLY person who doesn’t double gift with a physical gift in addition to the cash contribution.
Road Trip: I am doing a right terrible job of Not Complaining, so let’s talk about something positive. My husband and Carla and I are going on a Road Trip this summer!!!! Aside from the astronomical cost of gas, I am really excited about our Road Trip. (Yes, I am capitalizing it.) We finalized all our hotel stays over the weekend, and so now I am gleefully shopping for Road Trip Necessities. This is what my father refers to as a “Tool Buying Opportunity,” which is part of what makes the planning portion of something (an event, a hobby) as enjoyable as or more enjoyable than the actual thing itself. My husband is researching the best family audiobooks to buy (or check out from our library) for our trip, and I love that this is the way his trip planning excitement manifests. He has already played a few samples to Carla, so that they can figure out whether she’ll have trouble understanding the accent of the narrator.
Birthday Planning Stagnation: Despite ALL of your lovely suggestions, I have made ZERO progress toward planning Carla’s birthday party. Zero. This fills me with dread and anxiety. However, I will say that with every confident, encouraging comment about hosting a party here, I grew more and more entrenched in my certainty that having a party in my home is NOT the right way to go. So that was extremely helpful, and I am so appreciative. I genuinely envy those readers who are so easy-breezy about hosting an in-home birthday party. You make it sound so easy! And fun! And like the better choice! But my gut was clear: NO. So whatever we end up doing, it will be somewhere else. Your kind, helpful suggestions also clarified for me something that I already knew – but did not know I felt with such stringency – which is that I loathe trampoline parks. We used to take Carla when she was smaller, because it was a great way to release her endless reserves of energy in the dragging months of winter. But even then I always felt like I had to be careful not to touch ANYTHING, and I would always through Carla in the tub and her clothing in the washing machine the instant we returned home. Perhaps this speaks more to the cleanliness of my local trampoline park than to anything else, but since that’s what we have available, I am going to skip it. So I suppose even if I haven’t made any forward progress, I am at the very least narrowing the field. Thank you so much for your help, even if you may feel like I am ignoring your very helpful recommendations. Your advice is helpful nonetheless.
Handyman: In other good news, I finally finally got a handyman to not only return my call, but to come over and look at my long list of projects!!!! He seems great. He reviewed things and took measurements, and was very clear on things he can/will do and things he cannot/won’t. The most important result, though, is that he CAN and WILL repair our ceiling. I don’t know if I’ve described our ceiling hole in this space, but I am going to do so now in case you want to skip to the next equally riveting bullet. It is not a hole, per se. It is more like a place where the plaster has declined to provide its normal coverage. The plaster is peeling away from whatever material forms the ceiling, and so it looks like a hole. We have had the spot examined several times by a plumber (and by our fathers), and it does not appear to be a leak. And it’s been there for YEARS, so I think we would know by now. But this stupid plaster lapse makes me so self-conscious about our house. It looks terrible, and it’s right above the kitchen table, and I hate it. And now it will be fixed!!!! Of course, there is no scheduled date for the fixing; the handyman warned me he is booked out for several weeks. So I guess now I am just hoping he really will send me an estimate and offer some dates. I almost don’t care what it will cost because I want it fixed. But then again, I have no idea what this kind of thing should cost, so… I will report back on whether it is a swallowable amount or something that kicks me in the gut and forces me to live with the stupid hole for longer. Like I said, we’ve been living with it for YEARS, so it shouldn’t be such a big deal to keep on living with it. But at some point in the past few months, I have reached some sort of tell-tale heart level of complete inability to co-exist with this thing for one second longer.
Calendar Bedlam: Recently, I am having an issue that makes me think my mind is on a steep decline. I keep making plans, putting them in EMPTY SPOTS in my calendar, and then realizing – sometime later – that I have double booked myself. Example 1: A friend invites me to a performance. I check the calendar and see I have plans that night. I decline. Later, a friend invites me to dinner. I check the calendar and see I am free, so I accept. The next time I talk to the performer friend, she mentions the day of her performance… which is on the day I originally had free but now do not. Example 2: I set a playdate for Carla. The next day, I notice that she in fact has an orthodontist appointment that day, so I have to reschedule the playdate. Example 3: I have to do a mandatory nicotine test per our insurance, so I schedule it in an empty spot on the calendar. I get a reminder for the test at the same time I get a reminder for a meeting with Carla’s teacher, because I have scheduled them in the same time slot. WHY AM I DOING THIS AND HOW CAN I STOP.
Dirty Martinis: I recently learned the joy and beauty of a very, very dirty martini. My whole life, I have been staunchly anti-vodka, but it seems that may be because I have only ever had cheap vodka? I recently had a martini with really good, smooth vodka and it was delicious. Then I made one at home, with the fancy expensive vodka my father-in-law drinks, and it was also delicious. I am now out of olive juice.
Jury Duty: My stint of jury duty went GREAT. The summons said that we needed to be available for five days, beginning on a Monday. So I prepared to be gone that entire week. When I did jury duty several years ago, I went in on a Monday, sat around all day, and then was called to a courtroom near the end of the day. I wasn’t selected for that jury, but I was released from jury duty for the rest of the week. This time, you call a number in advance of your service and figure out if your jury number has been selected for that day. I got to miss two days, but my number was called for Wednesday. Then I arrived at the courthouse, sat around all day, and… was released. I didn’t have to go back at all! It was… kind of pleasant? Of course, the anticipation was the dreadful part. I had to worry about childcare for Carla for the whole week, and then I had to worry about driving on a freeway during rush hour, and I had to worry about parking downtown. But once I had Carla stowed at school, had made it downtown, parked, and successfully made it to the courthouse, it was fine! Pleasant, even! It was a beautiful day and we got ninety minutes (!!!!) for our lunch hour, so I got something from Starbucks and walked around downtown. I was even a teeny bit disappointed that I didn’t get selected for a case – I think it would be interesting to serve on a jury. The biggest inconvenience of the week, it turned out, was that I kept having to email the school to let them know that Carla would or wouldn’t be arriving early for babysitting services.
Step Off: My watch has developed quite an overblown sense of its own roll in my life lately. Constantly telling me to stop and breathe, or noting that I am usually more active at this time of day what is up????, or advising me that I can “still do it!” if I just take a brisk 20-minute walk at 11:15 pm on a weekday. And now this??? Stay in your lane, watch. I am doing the best that I can.
Keto Stall: I feel the need to give you a keto update. During my extravagant jury duty lunch hour, I ordered coffee with cream (despite the fact that I hate coffee) and a pre-made lunch kit that seemed to be fairly keto-friendly: salami, cheese, and some nuts/dried fruit that I ate even though I’m sure it was full of sugar. I did not eat the crackers. Anyway: I continue to follow a low-carb plan. And I have completely stalled. It is SO frustrating. I am doing the plan, I am eating the high-protein/high-fat foods. I am in ketosis. And yet my weight has gone nowhere. It wouldn’t be so terrible except that I HATE it. Food is not fun or enjoyable. I do not look forward to meals, and in fact actively dread them. I cannot stand to plan meals, because they are inevitably some variation on meat + veg, or else they are complicated and frequently end up tasting awful. I am constantly asking my husband what I should make for dinner. I am not having fun, I am not losing weight, it is all awful. And yet any time I LOOK at a carb, I instantly gain two pounds. So I don’t think I’m ready to quit keto either. At least I am maintaining this not-quite-ten-percent-of-my-bodyweight weight loss. ARGH.
A Good Salad: I did make a really good salad recently. It was arugula (yum) and spinach (yuck), heavily weighted on the arugula side for me and on the spinach side for my husband (who dislikes arugula). I added goat cheese, blueberries, strawberries, a sprinkling of sliced almonds, and grilled chicken. And then I added balsamic dressing because I love dressing as much as I love sauce. (Perhaps this is causing the stall in the previous bullet, perhaps indeed, although I don’t eat salads often because of the dressing factor.)
Strawberry Marketing: The strawberries in the aforementioned salad were PINK. My grocery store had a big display and they had a lot of marketing to assure customers that the strawberries are fully ripe! And taste like pineapple! I had to try them. My husband wondered if they might taste like underripe strawberries and indeed they did. They were fine with some goat cheese and balsamic dressing though, but NOT worth $6.99 per container when I can buy actual ripe strawberry tasting strawberries for $3.50. Between these berries and the miniature iceberg lettuces, produce marketers are really working hard for their money, let me tell you.
Garden Inertia: Let us turn to another pleasant topic, which is gardening. Of which I have also done ZERO. What the hell am I doing with my time, if I am not cooking or gardening or planning Carla’s birthday party? I am fretting and wringing my hands and going in circles is what. We have people coming for dinner this weekend, so now I am suddenly feeling Very Urgent about having at least some flowers in pots. It’s not like my “garden” is anything impressive. But I do like to have a few pots with flowers and I need to do that. Perhaps Carla and I will go after school.
Spring Shopping Syndrome: In addition to fretting/hand wringing, I have been struck by Spring Shopping Syndrome. You are familiar with this yes? The point at which the weather begins to edge carefully toward warmth and suddenly you hate every single item of clothing you own? I have been buying (and then returning) things with great abandon. Loft has been my latest obsession, and they know it: they keep emailing me with adorable dresses front and center, and so I order the dress and then it doesn’t fit and I take it back. But, to get free shipping, I added on a cute blouse, and that DID fit, so now I have that sweet, sweet dopamine rush of clicking “buy” alongside the possibility, however small, that the item I bought will be cute, which makes me want to repeat the process all over again. Interesting how I am able to analyze this behavior and see it for what it is and yet I still can’t stop/won’t stop.
All right, that’s it for now my dear Internet.
What’s clogging your calendar this month? Have you made any springy purchases? Tell me which deer-proof flowers to buy for my garden.
I am in the thick of it right now, and it’s not even very thick – people are in much thicker situations, and dealing just fine, and here I am flailing around. So I am feeling stressed and also irritated with myself for being stressed over so little. It really doesn’t take much.
Taking a page from Swistle’s book and buying pretty flowers so at least there’s something bright in my day.
Obviously, at the top of the frets list is the awfulness going on in Ukraine. The thought of people losing their homes, their loved ones, their lives… the thought of cities being devasted and bombed… the thought of babies and cancer patients huddled in basements and subway tunnels… it is all so awful. And then there is the underlying threat of a giant nuclear-weapon wielding toddler getting bored or angry and throwing a temper tantrum that results in nuclear destruction. Of course, there is other extremely upsetting stuff going on here in the US and around the world at the same time. The media coverage feels absolutely gleeful, there is so much bad stuff to go around. I am avoiding as much of the news as I can, which is, of course, a very privileged option. But it’s all horrible, whether you try to ignore it or not.
Did I mention that I stayed home today with a sick kiddo? (It’s not Covid.) I would have stayed home anyway, but being at home hits differently when there is a child at home with you. In totally unrelated news, her school went mask-optional last week. Carla was elated about the option to stop masking, and so she stopped masking. My husband and I supported this for several reasons, but it really came down to the fact that she is nearly nine and we literally cannot force her to wear a mask. Once she’s at school, all bets are off. Anyway, some of those virulent little bugs that have been waiting around for two years to get a crack at some delicious elementary schoolers jumped right on board. Right on in there. It took one week for this to happen.
We are still wearing masks in public, even though cases are very low in my area right now. However, my husband and I did go to a restaurant for my birthday. We did not wear masks in the restaurant. (Although I put mine on to visit the restroom.) It feels a little odd to pick and choose this way. No masks at school, no masks at a restaurant. But I will throw on a mask to go to the grocery store or the post office. I don’t know. It all feels very strange.
Dinners this week? Ha. I have not thought about a single dinner beyond tonight. No one will starve. I have some broccoli and some lettuce and some green beans to make as sides. We are having tacos for dinner tonight, even though the thought of tacos makes me queasy. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.
Speaking of taco queasiness, I am doing Keto again. Sigh. This is Week Six, which seems like a good point at which to share it with you. Leave it to Keto to make my favorite food in all the world unappealing. It’s just that I’ve eaten so very much taco meat in the past six weeks. Piles and piles of it. Turns out I really need shells to enjoy the taco experience. I will try not to talk about it a whole lot, although I have found a few products and a few modifications that have made it better, this time around. If you are interested, maybe I will write a post about them. I mean, I may write a post about it anyway, no promises, but I will put something Keto-related in the headline so you can skip it if you are so inclined.
I made up a big batch of Costco salmon last night, which was DELICIOUS, but then I realized that I may be eating too much salmon, and looked it up and INDEED I am eating like 50 times the recommended salmon amount, so now what? I don’t want to let the salmon go bad. Plus it is delicious. How quickly does mercury poisoning set it, anyway?
I did a yoga workout today and Adriene said something about how I needed to clear the desk of my mind. Well. My desk and my mind are pretty aligned, I’d say. (I did not get a lot out of today’s session.)
I have to be honest, it’s looked worse.
Things that are stressing me out, on the opposite end of the nuclear-warfare spectrum:
We are going on a trip. I have all the usual pre-trip stresses, like making packing lists and checking that the plane schedule is the same, and trying to figure out how to remain clothed in the days leading up to the trip without needing to do extra laundry. Plus, the pandemic-era pre-trip stresses, like wondering whether our flights will be canceled or our rental car will be there when we arrive or whether we will all contract Covid in the airport on the way to or from our destination.
I have a meeting with a new potential client. I am excited but nervous. We are meeting in person, which is adding to the nerves. As is typical of my stress about situations like this, I am hyper-focused on WHAT DO I WEAR. I have nothing to wear, nothing at all.
I volunteered for a school project, because I wanted to be more involved at school. And it is turning out to be MUCH more involved than I ever imagined. I mean, this is a thing that happens yearly. There should be clearly defined policies and procedures that I can follow. And yet it is a situation where I feel like I am in a dark room and I can only shine my flashlight on one thing at a time, and even then I can’t get a really good sense of the layout of the furniture or what things I’m missing. It is also taking A LOT OF TIME.
A friend – who is heading up a different school project – asked me many months ago if I would help with a small aspect of her project. I said yes. But now I am concerned that I will be too busy with my project to devote enough time/attention to hers, but it’s also too late to back out.
My in-laws are coming to visit. I am so happy and relieved that my mother-in-law has completed chemotherapy. She and my father-in-law are coming up for some post-chemo doctors’ appointments and tests. It will be great to see them, but it is never un-stressful to have guests.
I am on the docket for jury duty. I only had to report for one day each of the last two times I was called for jury duty. The odds are not in my favor for skipping out on it again, are they.
When am I supposed to WRITE, which is supposedly my main priority?
Something that is not stressing me out, but is still requiring time and energy, and, okay, a little stress, is that Girl Scout Cookies arrived. The part I hate the most, aside from asking people to spend money, is the collecting of the money. What if Carla or I make a mistake? What if we under- or overcharge someone? We already had one incident where a neighbor said that a box of cookies was missing – but in fact she had written on the form that she wanted to donate a box. So we are already on the hook for that box of cookies. It is only $5, and paying $5 is worth more than insisting the neighbor pay it. But I hate stuff like that!
The floor of my office right now.
Carla and I ran some errands today. Her fever was gone (which means she can return to school tomorrow), and we mainly stayed in the car. We did go into the pharmacy, where we encountered a man with a giant bloodhound. Carla, of course, wanted to pet the dog and he, of course, wanted very much to be petted by Carla. Also, he had a very long, twisty Biblical name which I thought was absolutely spectacular for a bloodhound. Why the dog was in the pharmacy is a mystery (he wasn’t wearing a vest that indicated he is a helper dog), but it was a fun encounter nonetheless.
Another fun sight: I ran into the post office to drop off a StitchFix return, and on the way in I saw a man carrying a Netflix DVD to return!!!! What a blast from the past! I desperately want to know this man and his life.
I bought a carton of strawberries yesterday. Listen, I KNOW that strawberries are Not Good in March. This is not strawberry season. But they were so lovely and plump and red, and I just couldn’t resist them. I haven’t opened the carton yet, so they are currently Schrödinger’s Strawberries, and could very well be juicy and delicious.
How are you, Internet? What’s cluttering the desk of YOUR mind?
It feels like there are a bunch of things BUGGING me this morning, and maybe the best way to situate them in my mind is to write them out. Then I can DEAL WITH them, rather than having them clamber around in my brain. Plus, you are very often so sensible and helpful with suggestions. Not that I am asking you to SOLVE anything for me – I know you have your own stuff. Which I would love to hear about, by the way. I am happy to offer a gentle arm squeeze and a sympathetic head nod, if that’s what you need.
(And perhaps it goes without saying, but I do realize that I am DEEPLY LUCKY to be able to complain about this kind of non-life-threatening type of stuff. I do.)
MORNINGS
I am writing this in the morning, so this is top of mind. But mornings are AWFUL. AWFUL. I wake Carla up at 7:00. She needs to be in the car by 7:50. We are almost never in the car by 7:50. I spend the entire hour wheedling and prompting and checking-in and badgering and growing more and more frustrated and furious until I inevitably yell at her. And then I feel like a shitty mother and a shitty human being, and I cry as I drive home, and the rest of the day is soured.
It feels like we have tried EVERYTHING! Everything! We try to get her to sleep at a reasonable time (of course, that doesn’t always work, but we TRY). She is in bed by 7:30, and story time ends at 8:00. So presumably she is getting enough sleep. We pick out her clothes the night before, and then I put them on top of her when I wake her up, so she doesn’t even need to get out of bed to put them on. We have gone through periods when she chooses what she wants for breakfast the night before, too (although that didn’t help at all). We make sure she has everything she needs for school right there at the door, ready to go the night before. I have encouraged her to talk her way through each task (“I’m getting dressed, I’m getting dressed.” “I’m brushing my teeth, I’m brushing my teeth.”) to keep her focused. I have tried waking her up EARLIER. I have tried waking her up LATER. I have tried task lists, that she has to cross off (get dressed, make bed, brush teeth). I have tried offering prizes for getting out the door on time. I have tried consequences (loss of screen time) for getting out the door late. I have tried sitting in my car by myself, fuming, until she gets in. I have tried yelling. I have tried time out. NOTHING WORKS. This morning, she had the special treat of going to school with her father. She still took twenty minutes to put on her clothing. It SHOULD NOT TAKE TWENTY MINUTES. I hate it so, so much. Yes, I know that I rarely have anywhere to be, but I do have a schedule I like to follow. And starting my day fifteen minutes later than I want to – and being MAD – is not a good way to start the day! Starting the day by yelling at my child is not a good way to start the day! Feeling like my time has no value to anyone but me is not a good way to start the day!
There is no consequence for her being late to school, which is a big part of the problem. Her school is doing staggered drop offs because of Covid, and they just aren’t counting people tardy. I WISH THEY WOULD. Although… I don’t really know what the penalty is, for being tardy?
I hate being late! I am a Be There Five Minutes Early person! Mornings are driving me insane!
P.S. My husband is not helpful, in any way. He is either long gone before she wakes up, or he is sleeping in and then worrying about get his own body out the door.
Anyway. Mornings are the WORST. I am going to lose my mind. My mind will leave promptly at 7:50 and be on time and never return, and the rest of me will still be here, urging Carla to PUT ON HER SOCKS FOR THE LOVE.
CANCELLATIONS
I don’t know if it’s Covid or the snowy weather (although we live in a part of the world where winter happens ANNUALLY, so you’d think people would get the idea by now), but so many people are cancelling their appointments with my husband. HOW is he supposed to make a living if he doesn’t see patients??? And I don’t see any way to fix this problem – not that I have any control over it as it is. It’s intermittent, so you can’t really predict when it’s going to happen. And he already overbooks his schedule to try to find a happy medium. But if you overbook too much, and everyone shows up, then you have a bunch of annoyed patients and a stressed-out, overworked doctor. There is literally nothing I can do about this, and yet I it is making me anxious and fretful.
FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY
My parents are celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this summer. What a wonderful, momentous milestone! We are traveling to visit them, to celebrate together. I would love to Do Something as a tribute, but I have no idea what. NO IDEA. My only thought is to somehow order a cake, similar to what they had at their wedding? But the celebration takes place in a very remote part of the world. I suppose I could call the place we’ll be staying, and see if they have any ideas… but I hate phone calls. I made a photo book for my mom’s 70th birthday, so I could try to put something like that together – with well-wishes from friends and family. But a) I just did that, so it feels like asking the same friends/family for more well-wishes will be annoying to them and b) I don’t know if “well-wishes” is worthy of a whole book? I am willing to spend a significant amount of time/money on doing something special, but I don’t know what to do.
WRITING CLASS
One of my aspirations for 2022 was to sign up for a writing class, and lo, I did so. It begins in mid-February and I am FREAKING OUT. I am going to have to (virtually) meet new people and complete assignments and Do Things and the whole thing is making my stomach churn. That is all.
FRIENDS FRETS
I haven’t talked to my best friend from back home in… a long time. While I certainly haven’t been able to find time to call her (we inevitably talk for a full hour or more, so it requires planning and coordination with my husband), neither has she made any effort to get in touch with me. Which makes me feel (UNFAIRLY, I know) that she doesn’t really care about our friendship.
Another very dear friend is going through A Hard Time, and I am really worried about her. But I don’t know what to DO about it. This is the problem with friends that live thousands of miles away. I can’t just pop over to see her. I don’t know any of her friends or colleagues. I don’t even know her favorite restaurants/bakeries in order to send her a gift certificate or fun surprise. Honestly, I don’t even know what she likes well enough to choose something for her. Does she like candles? Will she eat chocolate or nuts? Does she have a bathtub, and, if so, would she appreciate some bath products? I want to make her life a little better/more bearable if I can, and I don’t know how.
Perhaps it seems strange that she is literally one of my closest friends in the universe and yet I don’t know very basic things about her… but we only lived in the same place for two years nearly 20 years ago and have only seen each other in person twice since then. We connect on Big Picture/Inner Life things, not everyday mundanities. You probably know more about me than she does!
NEW FRET
Great. Now I am fretting that I am “doing” friendship wrong.
UNFINISHED PROJECTS
My husband and I got such a good start to the year! We set up Carla’s craft area in the basement, which necessitated cleaning the entire basement and purging a huge amount of stuff. And then… we just left it, halfway done. We have paint cans that we need to fill with paint thickener, so we can then get rid of them. We need to get a carpet to go under Carla’s craft table, so that she can do things like paint down there. We need to figure out a storage solution for all her craft supplies, so that they can be tidied away rather than left all over the table. I need to go through bins of old baby items so we can get them out of the middle of the basement. I need to winnow six years of Carla’s Special Art Projects that we’ve saved. (These last two are really only jobs for me, because I CARE, and my husband cares less.)
We bought the supplies needed to fix our coat closet door, but have done nothing with them.
We still haven’t done anything about the gallery wall.
There are still piles of Carla’s old picture books (that we culled from her shelves LAST YEAR) on the floor of my bedroom, waiting for us to find a place to store them until we can foist them off on Carla and her potential future children.
The books we culled from our collection are STILL IN MY OFFICE.
WHY can’t we finish anything? WHAT is wrong with us? HOW am I the only one who cares enough to fret about this and remind us to do anything about it and push and prod and nag about it? This. This is what is going to finally drive me over the edge.
Except probably not, because I’ll get halfway to the edge and then never complete the act of going over it.
HURT FEELINGS
This is dumb to refer to, because I cannot be specific. But my feelings are hurt, to the point that I spend a lot of time crying, and it’s a situation where I cannot share that with the person who is hurting them. You just have to trust me. It wouldn’t help at all. In fact, it would make things worse, because this person would then feel guilty/awful and probably still be unable to make me feel better… only now we would both be aware of that failure, instead of just me. What needs to happen is I need to Get Over It, even if that seems impossible. But I am still feeling very bruised and sad about the whole thing.
PHONE CALL
There is always a phone call to make, isn’t there? This time, I have two looming over me. Plus three zoom meetings this week that I am not looking forward to. Ugh ugh ugh.
Well. Happy Monday to you, friend. I hope that YOUR week is off to a better, less fraught beginning!
I have Real Work to do this morning, but I am in a mini panic and sometimes it helps to get that out first. Like blowing the nose, it helps with breathing.
That rather disturbing image reminded me of something: the last time I went to Costco, there was no Kirkland Brand toilet paper, so I was forced (“forced”) to buy Charmin, which I would never normally buy because it is expensive. We just recently started using the Charmin and a) it is very thick and very soft and b) it disappears in an instant. I have replaced THREE ROLLS this week already, which is ABSURD, especially when I am the only person home for most of the day and there is nothing driving additional toilet paper usage. You know. Like an influx of squishable/flushable bugs. WHY is it disappearing at such a frantic rate?
Since I have already meandered off the path, I will further note that I grew up in a house where toilet paper was also used as facial tissue. You had to blow your nose, you used not-Charmin. This was one of the Inherited Differences my husband and I had to battle out when we married; he had a Kleenex childhood. We do HAVE Kleenex in our home, now. But it’s mainly for guests. (My husband does not blow his nose unless he has a cold, which is something I cannot fathom; I need to clear the nasal passages every morning but old toilet-tissue habits die hard.)
Goodness, this post has gotten off to a rather unpleasant start.
Onward, to my holiday mini panic.
Perhaps I need some of the CBD products Another Me has been ordering, using my email address instead of her own. CBD oil is supposed to have a soothing effect, right? I’ve never tried it. I do not understand why she does not know her own email address, but it does look like her actual mailing address is hers and not mine. If she didn’t live in the UK, I might consider sending her a letter about all the times I’ve gotten work emails and product confirmations that she might not like a stranger seeing.
She’s not the only person who is using my contact info as her own: someone named Joann (which I find amusing because of this post) has missed several recent updates about a FedEx delivery because she used my phone number instead of her own. I wonder if I have ever done this, inadvertently?
Oh right, right. The topic at hand.
I have been trying so hard to be on top of Holiday Stuff. And yet it has all fallen completely apart. Despite my best intentions – and considerable nagging – the holiday cards are still sitting in my office, un-enveloped, un-addressed, un-stamped. I don’t even HAVE stamps, which is really on me. Worse, we still have SO MANY Christmas gifts to buy, and then wrap and mail. It is giving me the vapors. THE VAPORS.
(Lest you think we wasted a wonderful five-day holiday during which we could have accomplished most of this stuff: yes, yes we did waste it. But my husband wanted a BREAK, and to do things he never gets to do, like sleep in, and work on his music, and play video games. He really does work very hard, and so I didn’t want to deny him a few days off from bothering him about All the Stuff We Need to Accomplish. To be fair: we did plan a Big Upcoming Trip, which required a lot of comparing of airline schedules and researching hotels and rental cars and coordinating with family who will join us. So that was at least something we took care of.)
Listen, I realize I am lucky that my husband wants to be an Active Participant in the holiday stuff. He likes to have a say in what the holiday card looks like, for instance. He is also the Keeper of the Addresses, which is a good thing, because they are uniform and neat and always print out on labels exactly the way they should, and I no longer have to hand-address 80+ envelopes. He helps determine what to get his parents, who are very difficult to shop for. He is very good at keeping us within the confines of a budget.
But he does not share my sense of urgency.
Obviously, he works 10-12 hour days helping patients, which is undeniably Important Work. So he has less time than I do to fret about this kind of thing. (He is also not really the fretting type.) Plus, he seems to have an aversion to doing things earlier than absolutely necessary. (Although I would argue we passed “absolutely necessary” when the calendar shifted to December.) I started the Christmas gift talk months ago, and his brain just doesn’t process it that far in advance. Even last month, when I was starting to build up a real froth, he was reluctant to get going – and it took several forwarded articles from reliable news sources about shipping delays and supply chain issues for him to finally relent to ordering a few things. He also likes to do lots of research before making a purchase. And, listen, I appreciate how meticulous he is about price comparisons and finding the exact best version of a product. Really, I do. I don’t have the patience for that myself, and so I’m glad he does it.
But all of this adds up to VERY SLOW. A turtle riding a sloth could get things done more quickly. Sometimes I just want to be able to take decisive action: This holiday card is good enough: order! This would make a good gift for my mother-in-law: purchase!
Of course, if that were the case, I would then feel aggrieved and frustrated about being solely responsible for gift giving. Sigh.
As it is, I feel aggrieved and frustrated about being The One Who Decorates. Christmas décor doesn’t matter to my husband, so it’s up to me. At least Carla (currently) finds it fun to help. We haven’t started decorating yet; I think we will wait until after Hanukkah, although I have hung up the Christmas Reading Countdown Calendar already and have brought up Carla’s holiday dishes at her request.
I also feel aggrieved and frustrated about being The Gift Nag. Every conversation with my husband lately includes me prodding him about gift ideas or asking him to send me the holiday addresses so I can update them. Every conversation includes an increasingly strident warning about shipping times (and his retort that we haven’t experienced any of those shipping delays in any of our orders) (and my unvoiced response: NOT YET).
(And also: we have experienced some product delays. We ordered caramels for everyone on our list weeks ago and those have yet to arrive. Hurry, hurry little caramels! One of you needs to be on its way across the continent!)
I am also feeling aggrieved and frustrated that my office has become Box Central. All the gifts we’ve ordered and have yet to wrap are in my office. All the beautiful boxes that I’ve collected over the past few months and have saved for gift-sending purposes are in my office. Our brand-new artificial Christmas tree (sob) is waiting just outside my office door to be unboxed and set up. I cannot USE my office currently, and that’s deeply irritating and makes me feel extra buzzy-in-the-blood about getting all those boxes OUT.
What can I do but fret and panic?
Well. I suppose I can take a deep breath. I can go for a walk outside in the 50(!) degree sunshine. I can remind myself of all the things I have completed: I do have my husband and Carla (mostly) covered. I do have most of the gifts for my own parents. I do have my sister-in-law and niece’s gifts – I just need to wrap them and send them. My brother requested no gifts this year, so he and my sister-in-law are taken care of. I do have stocking stuffers sorted. I can go buy stamps. I can update the holiday addresses. I can make a nice tidy list of things we have yet to complete:
Address and mail holiday cards
Finalize purchases for Carla’s “rilly big box full of all craft stuf”
Wrap and mail gifts for sister-in-law and niece
Mail caramels to my brother and sister-in-law whenever they get here
Buy the final gift for my mother
Buy the final gift for my father
Buy all gifts for my mother-in-law
Buy all gifts for my father-in-law (including birthday gifts)
Buy all gifts for my aunt-in-law
Okay, listing it out made me MORE panicky. Have I done ANYTHING to prepare for Christmas?! THERE IS SO MUCH STILL TO DO.
We’ll just have to buckle down and finalize everything this weekend. We must we must WE MUST.
(Is this making you feel better about your own holiday state of affairs? What do you have left to accomplish?)
Everything continues to grow more terrible and worrisome in the world and I hope you and your loved ones are safe, healthy, and coping okay.
Here, I am dealing with my own very-small-in-the-grand-scheme frets and stresses, including, as always, what to feed my family.
I had dinners for the week all planned out as of LAST MONDAY and was feeling very smug about the whole thing… but now my in-laws are coming for an unspecified amount of time, and they are staying with us, and so that whole list is OUT THE WINDOW. For one thing, I do not want to experiment with new dishes when it not just my very forgiving, very agreeable husband who is trying them with me. For another, having guests is so stressful that I want EASY and prep-ahead-able.
I have not come up with much, let me tell you. I think my plan is going to be “mainly takeout.” But there are a couple of nights where that is just not possible, because we have Evening Commitments.
Oh, I guess now I am going to do some fretting.
My husband asked his parents if there were any things we could get at the grocery store, to have for them to eat while they’re here. They requested milk and cereal, which are obviously things I am happy to provide… But… what else??? What do they eat for lunch??? I feel like I have purchased deli meat in the past, so that they could have sandwiches, and it ended up going bad and I had to throw it away. But I think they were staying at a hotel, which makes it much easier to go grab lunch elsewhere. I don’t know if they will be meeting friends for lunch while they are here (which ACK is a Whole Other Topic that makes me very nervous, because I think we all have very different ideas of what it means to “be careful” during a pandemic ACK ACK ACK), or if they just assume that we will have lunch meat in the fridge? But we don’t EAT lunch meat. Why am I spending an entire paragraph fretting about lunch meat? Should I just go get some ham and turkey and plan to throw it out? Probably the cost would be worth ridding myself of this particular anxiety.
Currently, the plan is that my in-laws will be leaving the day before Labor Day, which is two days before Rosh Hashanah, so ostensibly I do not have to plan Labor Day/Rosh Hashanah meals for them. BUT they are here for health reasons, and so it’s possible that they will change their departure date. Which means I may have to plan Special Meals at the last minute. Obviously, I do not want to do that. I fretted about the Labor Day point to my husband, and he said, “hotdogs and hamburgers, done” and that made me feel MUCH better. So I guess Labor Day is taken care of. I do not even KNOW what to make for Rosh Hashanah, because I am not Jewish. I suppose I could make a brisket, but I don’t like brisket, nor do I know how to cook one. Okay. I am going to think about this later.
While I am glad that we can host my in-laws while they are dealing with the health stuff, and obviously volunteered to have them come stay with us, I am still stressed about it. Having extra people in my space is never easy. And it has gotten LESS easy since the pandemic.
Also did I mention that this is a Call Week? Which means my husband will be working longer and more unpredictable hours?
Well. We do what we can.
Dinners for the Week of August 30-September 5
Mahi Mahi in Lemon Garlic Cream Sauce with Sautéed Zucchini: This is a new-to-me recipe, but it’s one my husband sounded interested in, so I put it immediately on the list.
Tacos: This was Carla’s request for Tuesday, and I need an easy meal for Tuesday, and my in-laws seem fine with tacos, so done and done.
Crockpot BBQ Pork Tenderloin with Coleslaw and Roasted Potatoes: This is for soccer night, when Carla has practice during the dinner hour. I got some slider buns for the people in my family who like sandwiches (not me), and some pre-shredded cabbage, and some baby red potatoes. Easy to put together, and the potatoes can roast while we put Carla to bed.
Grilled Pork Chops with Some Sort of Vegetable: Pork chops were on sale. I will deal with the vegetable later. Probably corn on the cob or zucchini. I do need to go refill our propane tank for the grill, though.
Takeout: Bless all those hardworking people in the restaurant industry. I plan to lean on their services a LOT this week.
I am also going to make my favorite plum cake at some point this week. Because we haven’t had it this summer, and I feel like it is a quintessential summer food, and because cake is such a soothing, comforting food.
What are you eating this week, Internet? And what are the go-to meals you feel houseguests?
Last week, my state’s Mask In Public order expired. When I went to the grocery store the next day, instead of seeing a creeping-upward number of people without masks, I was the only person wearing a mask. The only one. I told the checker and the bag person that it was so nice to see their faces after so long – and it was – but it was also startling (I kept that last part to myself).
Those who wear masks in public places are now far and away the minority. (Grumble grumble in the direction of stores who have completely useless signs that say wishy-washy things like, “We recommend that you should probably wear a mask if you aren’t vaccinated, but there is of course no way we can check or enforce anything tee hee” rather than saying “WEAR A MASK UNTIL YOU ARE FULLY VACCINATED.”) My husband and I have been wearing them still – he wears them at work, obviously, because health care is one of the remaining holdouts in mask-wearing, and in public we are both just still feeling skittish and leery of going mask-free. But I am trying really hard to gear myself up to not wear one. After all, I am vaccinated; I should be protected from Covid-19, even if I am hanging out in a group of maskless people who all have Covid-19. (Shudder.) I am not begrudging ANYONE at all their personal comfort level; wear a mask for the rest of your days if that’s what floats your boat; I completely understand and will not judge. But I do feel like maybe, for me, it is time to start dipping my toe into the maskless water.
So I went to Target this morning with the idea that I would NOT wear a mask. Just to try it out. I was going very early and there would be only a handful of people there anyway. And I could wear a mask around my wrist, for comfort. But then I wore my mask inside anyway. I understand that this is akin to – we are apparently still going with the water metaphors – wearing a life vest long after I’ve exited the boat. But it still feels like I could topple into the ocean at any minute, I guess. I need to get my mask-free legs under me.
And also my Social Interaction legs.
My sister-in-law and niece came for a visit this past weekend. It was lovely – LOVELY! – to see them. They stayed in a hotel. We played outside as much as possible, and when the girls were in the house they wore masks. We did eat meals inside the house, together, though, which was a Big Scary Step for me; the girls were on opposite ends of the table, but it still made me nervous. We didn’t really DO anything; aside from one morning when we went to a petting zoo, we just hung around the house and chatted. (I didn’t even cook. Not once. I am still completely avoiding Making Things.) My niece and sister-in-law left Sunday and yesterday I felt so bone tired from multiple days of sustained social interaction that I could barely get out of bed.
Have I always become THIS worn out by social interactions? I mean, I know they have always been wearying. But to THIS level? So that all I could do yesterday was drape myself over various pieces of furniture and yawn?
Looking ahead, I am fretting that I have overscheduled myself: I have Social Interactions tomorrow, Friday, next Tuesday, and then at some as-yet-undetermined point next week as well. And then the following weekend, two birthday parties, then my in-laws come to visit, and Carla’s birthday party. Ack. Already I feel my inner self curling up inside me in a little ball, rocking back and forth and mumbling “too much, too much.”
But despite the pre-exhaustion, I am also really excited and happy to be engaging with The World again. If it’s not entirely comfortable for me, at least it’s good that Carla will be able to have playdates, and attend camp, and have people other than yours truly to interact with her this summer. I am very grateful.
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life of a doctor's wife 